Search the Community

I'm going to be building what is for me one of the most beautiful aeroplanes ever designed: The wonderful Hawker Fury The Fury I entered squadron service with the RAF in May 1931, re-equipping 43 Squadron. Only relatively small numbers of Fury Is were ordered, the type equipping No. 1 and 25 squadrons. At the same time, the slower Bristol Bulldog equipped ten fighter squadrons. The Fury II entered service in 1936–1937, increasing total number of squadrons to six. Furies remained with RAF Fighter Command until January 1939, replaced primarily with Gloster Gladiators and other types, such as the Hawker Hurricane. After their front line service ended, they continued in use as trainers. It was a fast, agile aircraft, and the first interceptor in RAF service capable of speed higher than 200 mph (321 kmh). It was the fighter counterpart to the Hawker Hart light bomber (which I'll also be building later next year!). The kit was originally issued by Montex but latterly Alley Cat, being mastered by Wojtek Kuakowski who then went on to found the Silver Wings company. when you open the box, everything shouts "Silver Wings": except for the interplane struts and undercarriage which are cast in white metal rather than resin reinforced with brass rod "a la Silver Wings": Instructions are "meh.......... challenging!": but the schemes and decals look good: References: I haven't decided which Fury to finish her as yet, possibly one of these: Fortunately Robert Hardy built one some years ago on Hyperscale so I've copied and printed out his words of advice. A lovely gaggle of Furies:

PR Spit is coming to the final stages, the 262B needs to come back to the bench and I desperately want to start on a late war fw190, but I have a club GB for June that goes under the theme Simply Red. Visiting the Peterborough Model Show here in the UK back in early March (Pretty sure that's going to be the only one for us this year), I purchased a set of Alleycat Drone decals and a cheap F6F from another vendor. Its all about the paintwork for this build/GB, but as normal the am call gets the better of me every time. The kit pit is very basic and Hannants just received CMK resin pits for this kit so in the basket! Set of Roy's wheels along the way as well and off we go. I mated the wings and fuselage as it was clear the pit would slot in from below, no problem. This allowed me to join the 2 parts very carefully to get a good, neat join with minimal sanding afterwards. I don't want to go down the sanding/re-scribing route with this one as like I said its all about a red themed model, and I quite like the shuttle rivets on the kit. A very knowledgeable member of our club provided a lot of photos showing the harnesses draped around the headrest of Hellcats prior to the pilots entering, so as a visual talking point that's what I did, especially after finding the Hellcat is not the most 'open' pit and very difficult to see the detail inside. The pit is now installed And the wings attached. Again the fit was very good and no filler required. Next up is the fuel cell. Again the parts are very clunky so I glued and sanded flush and will use some PE to replace the straps. Tall tail wheels on these planes so found the best photos to see the construction and set about recreating. Albion Alloy, and plasticard and rods and a few hours wrestling but happy with the outcome. Order sent for the red and orange paints, hopefully with me next week. Aaron

This is my entry for the Eric Brown GB: Alley Cat's Henschel HS-123A-1. The HS-123 is included in the Wikipedia's list of airframes flown by Eric Brown. Since the HS-123 was considered an obsolete design already in 1939 (production ran from 1936 to 1937), the two other subtypes HS-123B and HS-123C never made it beyond the single prototype stage (and probably did not survive the war) and so I will assume that the HS-123 flown by Eric Brown was an A. This is an all resin kit without any photoetch. No seat belt is provided in the kit so I will add an HPH Bf-109 belt, otherwise it will be built OOB. I may go with the kit decals or paint the markings, either way it will be painted as bird fighting on the Eastern front. Here are the box shots: Cheers, David

I've started fidgeting around with my revell G10 Erla and the brand new Alley Cat 109H conversion (meant for the G6), The intent behind this build is to have some fun and possibly annoy the 109 purists at the same time. I need some inspiration to get stuck in to this build, even at this stage - Help me find a fun paint scheme for this bird, it does not need to be German or even historically accurate. Basically anything but hello kitty! Once I really get stuck into the build, I'll start a post on the In Progress board. In the meantime I wanted to share a pic of roughly how this will look now that I've dry-fit the main Alley Cat resin parts. Looks great and I have to commend Ali over at Alley Cat, as this may be the best of their conversions I've come across yet. Perfect fit and it's VERY easy to make the needed cuts. I eyeballed them without measuring and the resin fits like Revell molded the parts themselves. Bravo, Alley Cat!